The syntax of Meskwaki (Algonquian; spoken in Iowa) is sensitive to grammatical relations such as subject, object, secondary object, and oblique, but word order is not used to distinguish subject from object. In other words, Meskwaki is an example of the type of language proposed by Mithun (1987) in which none of the six permutations of subject, verb, and object familiar from Greenberg (1966) can be identified as the basic word order. Instead, Meskwaki word order is sensitive to a template including positions specialized for discourse functions such as topic and focus. The word order template is largely flat, with no verb phrase (VP) constituent grouping together a verb and its direct object and excluding the subject. We here present a corpus-based study of a set of clauses in which word order might be predicted to play a role in distinguishing subjects from objects: clauses in which the subject and object are both marked as obviative, used for third persons peripheral to the discourse. We show below that even in this context word order is not determined by grammatical relations. Instead, word order is sensitive to the relative ranking of the two obviatives in the discourse, rather than functioning to indicate which argument is subject and which is object.

A secondary goal of the chapter is to emphasize the value of older written texts for language documentation. For Meskwaki there is an extraordinary corpus of nearly 27,000 pages of traditional narratives and ethnographic information, written during 1911–18 in the Meskwaki syllabary (Goddard 1996) by mostly monolingual speakers of Meskwaki for Smithsonian ethnologist Truman Michelson. This corpus is stored at the Smithsonian Institution's National Anthropological Archives (NAA). As discussed in Goddard (1990b), these texts constitute a remarkably accurate record of connected speech by fluent speakers who were skilled narrators: they preserve an oral culture on paper. For linguists, the NAA corpus is invaluable for discovering the discourse conditions influencing the order of constituents in Meskwaki, a language with extremely flexible word order, or for investigating the discourse-based opposition within third person known as obviation (Thomason 2003). Both obviation and word order are extensively discussed below.